WYOMING -- Although the original “South Beltline” may never have been a thing of beauty, it was for decades an engine of commercial activity that became the identity of Grand Rapids’ largest suburb.

In some respects, what now is known as 28th Street cast the mold for suburban development in West Michigan.

Now Wyoming leaders think they have a chance to be pioneers again, but this time with an urban mindset.

Fueled by a post-war boom of residents and retailers who emptied downtown Grand Rapids, the corridor once boasted the region’s first indoor shopping mall and, later, the world’s largest movie theater complex.

“They called it ‘Miracle Mile,’” said John Kennaugh, 87, Wyoming’s city manager in the early 1960s. “They called it that because they were trying to promote commercialization along 28th Street. I think they were taking a forward step at that time.”

Step forward 50 years and the scene is different: the shopping mall, Rogers Plaza, is dealing with high vacancies and financial troubles, and the movie theater, Studio 28, closed after attendance fell 75 percent from 1996 to 2008.

So after years of striving to sustain the fading retail mecca and bring back its golden era, city officials now are closing the book on the past half-century and crafting a new vision for the future.

A Turn on 28th Street campaign launched last year is producing urban land-use concepts in what a consultant called a pioneering “suburban retro-fit” that could be applied all over the Grand Rapids area.

“We’ve reached the end of the suburban model. We need to start embracing more of an urban model,” said Tim Cochran, Wyoming city planner. “The 28th Street corridor was extremely successful for 40 years. It was the envy.

“Because of our success out here, it took a toll on downtown Grand Rapids and, now, we’re a victim of the same type of development pattern. We’re not the only ones dealing with it. It’s really a national situation that’s playing out.”

As with many areas around the country, several factors converged following World War II to create on 28th Street what Cochran called a “textbook example” of exploding suburbia that caught everyone by surprise. The construction of U.S. 131 in the 1950s and growing demand for automobiles turned the strip into what one early shop owner called “the street that never sleeps.”

“Cars rule 28th Street,” businessman Fred Eardley said in a 1968 interview documented in “Wilderness to Wyoming,” a local history book. “There are 35 service stations from Burlingame Avenue to the East Beltline, nearly a dozen used car lots, and over 50 auto service centers of all types.

“Twenty-eighth Street has the most of everything in greater Grand Rapids.”

One local historian credits the 1936 opening of the now-closed General Motors plant for shifting the center of Wyoming to 28th Street. A decade later, before Wyoming was incorporated, the township office moved from Godfrey Avenue to the present City Hall site at 28th and what is now Michael Avenue in order to be nearer residential growth around the automotive plant, Dorothy Simon-Tibbe said.

“The residents of the township at the time were very upset that the township offices were located way out in the sticks,” said Simon-Tibbe, who moved to Wyoming in 1950 and worked as a newspaper reporter.

“At that time I could park by Town Talk (a service station at 28th and Clyde Park Avenue) and I could walk across 28th Street like, say, in 1951-52, hardly looking for cars.”

Back in those days, a large sand hill marked the western extent of 28th near Eardley’s store at Burlingame Avenue, and the east end had a hole in the ground where Fruit Basket Flowerland now operates at the Clyde Park intersection. Michael Avenue, in the middle, was a lane between two farms.

By the time Bill Branz’s family moved to a house on Colrain Street SW in 1960, the Beltline Drive-In, the precursor to Studio 28, was operating and Rogers Plaza was under construction.

“I have a lot of memories of hanging out at the mall,” said Branz, one of the “Wilderness to Wyoming” authors. “It was the place to go. For us kids, that was the thing.

“Just about anything you could imagine you could get at Rogers Plaza.”

City staff and consultants plan a Jan. 18 design meeting to fine-tune the land-use concepts emerging from the Turn On 28th Street process. A new master plan and zoning ordinance for 28th Street are targeted for introduction this spring. The goal is to get Wyoming leaders, 28th Street property owners and investors behind the same vision.

While that vision is still being formed, it’s clear that the look of Wyoming and its neighboring communities has changed. The so-called South Beltline of yesteryear once was the boundary of Grand Rapids’ southern loop. The new South Beltline, M-6, now veers four miles to the south, leaving so-called “downtown” Wyoming out of the loop.

“It really is scary to see all those empty buildings (on 28th Street), looking like Grand Rapids looked in the 70s,” Simon-Tibbe said. “Downtown Wyoming is really at Byron Center (Avenue) and 56th Street now.

“It’s switching from what it was: the nucleus is going to be around the (Metro Health) Hospital. Fifty years ago, the government office was kind of the center of the community. It isn’t in the center anymore. The body of the city traveled south.”

Simon-Tibbe figures the evolution of 28th Street has been a “natural process.” If that’s the case, then Wyoming for years has been fighting a losing battle. Despite suggestion that it be relocated farther south, a modern City Hall in 2002 was rebuilt at 28th and Michael to help stabilize what long has been seen as Wyoming’s core, said Gerald Mears, a retired city planner who worked with Wyoming since the 1970s.

The city over the years also tried unsuccessfully to widen 28th Street or turn it into a boulevard, build a 27th Street to improve traffic flow, attract more restaurants and promote development of a big-box store. One plan in the mid-1980s called for a 2-story addition to Rogers Plaza, with a pedestrian overpass connecting the mall to Rogers Department Store across the road.

“I’ve always thought if that pedestrian tube was put in, that might have made a big difference,” he said. “We made so many efforts. It wasn’t for lack of trying.

“Now, it’s tough. There’s competition all over.”

And there’s growing sentiment that the best future for 28th Street has little to do with its past. Kennaugh, the original city manager, said 28th Street provided a common identity for Wyoming’s various neighborhoods when the township incorporated in 1959 to block annexation by Grand Rapids. But it also compromised the identities of those neighborhoods, he said.

At a retreat last month, Wyoming officials envisioned those neighborhoods — and the heart of 28th Street — as a collection of downtown nodes characterized less by suburbia’s automobile than by a pedestrian-friendly setting with a mixture of commercial and residential land uses.

“It sounds to me like a good concept,” Kennaugh said. “(Rogers Plaza) was the hallmark of the time, but the competition now has drawn from that and they can’t do any more than what they’ve already done there unless they tear it down.